Travel Photography

Travel photography is a subcategory of photography involving recording of an area’s scenery, people, cultures and tradition, customs and history. According to The Photographic Society of America, a travel photo as an image that expresses the feeling or the sensation of a time and place, portrays a land, its people, or a culture in its natural state, and has no actual geographical limitations.

The thing about travel photography is that it is taken with equal enthusiasm by amateurs as well as by professionals. There are obviously professionals who travel all around the world and take amazing photographs. Commercial travel photography provides imagery for the $1 trillion global tourism industry. It might include photographing destination hotels and resorts, tourist attractions, scenery, adventures in the great outdoors, home events, cultures such as different festivals and customs. Images are of great use in advertising, merchandising, used in blogs and travel journals and print sales. With such a huge variety of subject matter and also a pretty big market for commercial selling of these photographs, travel photographers require skills across all photographic disciplines such as portraiture, landscape, architectural reportage, and wildlife and event photography.

Travel photography is not like other genres like fashion, product, or food photography in that it is still an underestimated and relatively less monetized part, though the obstacles faced by travel photographers are actually more than some of the genres where the light and other shooting conditions may be up to oneself and not at the mercy of nature.

This genre of photography entails shooting a wide variety of thongs under varied available conditions like low light photography indoors, accessible ambient light photography for exteriors of buildings and monuments, shooting on the streets where sometimes conditions may be hostile though such is likely to be classifies as photojournalism; capturing moments which rarely recur, capturing the magic of light while shooting landscapes and also capturing natural events that are inaccessible to a huge part of the world such as Aurora Borealis or an erupting volcano.

The biggest advantage of travel photography is no doubt the travel. It is a pleasure and no doubt a huge privilege to be able to travel to different stunning locations. Something that is quite rare and very few in the world are lucky enough to be so included. To be able to go and experience not only the scenic beauty of the place but have the good fortune to mix with the people, learn their road of life and be able to hold it up in photographs. It is a truly rewarding and amazing job.

On the other hand, if one is not tied up with publications such as National Geographic one might have trouble having enough finances to go along with their travels though freelancing in this profession has been abundant. With the increase of social media it bring sellers and buyers of such outstanding photographs closer together such that they interact more and this sector of photography can only grow bigger in the coming years.